"A major new section of ted.com is opening up next month," Anderson told Ars, "with new tools to enable 'flip teaching' and to add various tests and other resources."

These videos, similar to the celebrated TED Talks, are designed to augment curricula and inspire fruitful exchanges. They will be backed by a platform that allows teachers to share their experiences, challenges and successes with both other teachers and the public at large.

Fifteen months ago, TED started research for the program by hiring TED Fellow Logan Smalley. He and Anderson spent much of the intervening time talking to teachers and discovering what they wanted from the program. They learned that video can provide a number of positives for education. These include the ability to reach a greater audience and to show students things that would be difficult or impossible to duplicate in a classroom. With video, kids can also learn at their own pace.

The first dozen videos in the TED-Ed YouTube channel include "Deep Ocean Mysteries and Wonders" by oceanographer David Gallo, "How Pandemics Spread" by journalist Mark Honigsbaum, and "The Cockroach Beatbox" by neural engineer Greg Gage.

Some are skeptical that this format can achieve much for education, however. Among the skeptical is.Audrey Watters of Hack Education.

"While 'ideas worth spreading' might seem like a fabulous learning opportunity,” she told Ars, “TED Talks are of course 15 minute lectures, and while sure, oratory can be powerful and moving, let's not conflate that with 'teaching.' The new TED initiative seems to do so, suggesting that 'the greatest teachers in the world' are lecturers, the most interesting and provocative lessons are lectures, and that short 2-5 minute pieces of content are necessarily intellectually transformative."

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Curt Hopkins
Curt writes for Ars Technica about the intersection of culture and technology, including the democratization of information, spaceships, robots, the theatre, archaeology, achives and free speech. Twitter@curthopkins